This two Saturday workshop takes the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition Four Abstract Classicists as its focus, examining the 2 primary directions that emerged as alternatives to Abstract Expressionism in New York and California in the late 1950s: Assemblage Art on one hand and hard-edge and Post-Painterly abstraction on the other. It was in the late 50s that Jasper Johns, Red Grooms, Agnes Martin, Wallace Berman, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, and Billy Al Bengston had their first solo shows, the 4 latter being presented at the historic Ferus Gallery, which was founded in Los Angeles in 1957.

It was also at this time that Robert Rauschenberg unveiled a large group of Combines, John Chamberlain showed sculptures made of automobile parts, Louise Nevelson exhibited her first environment, and Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Ryman turned their attention to painting stripes, targets, and monochromes, respectively. This short course examines the various manifestations of these tendencies and traces their evolution into Fluxus, Pop Art, and Minimalism by the early 1960s.